... I think he noticed. Poor beggar!

I don't think we're arguing.  The interesting problem of rationality is that it dramatically expands the sphere of potential actions -- things we can do -- far beyond the accompanying expansion in things we should do or things we enjoy doing.

JS

To your second point: there are some immutable facts about what it means to be human, but human beings also make decisions and are thus self-determining to a large degree.  So they aren't just "what they are" in the sense that an inanimate object or a machine would be.  Human beings have potential, which means that at any given future point they could be almost anything, and as a consequence of the decisions they make in the present.  You can probably establish a narrow range of facts about humans by evolutionary theory, but you need to be careful not to exceed your scope.

"The origin is irrelevant."

I don't believe that's true.  No human behaviors are strictly rational, and most are utterly irrational: they exist to satisfy desires forged by selection pressure over millions of years.  

Neither am I making a value judgment.  Humans are what we are.  Given the millions of years of selection pressure for humans to be what we are, it shouldn't be surprising that we enjoy behaviors we've been selected for, and don't enjoy behaviors we haven't yet been selected for.  

See the Epilogue to The Gnoll Credo.  Humans play sports for fun, but won't grow grains without being paid or coerced.  We're amazingly powerful and accurate at throwing things, but remarkably susceptible to advertising.  We're far more interested in celebrity gossip than public policy.  Etc.

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (Dobzhansky)

JS

That being said, we have reasonably solid evidence that the majority of their calories came from hunted meat.  The reason we needed to be adaptive is because hunting smaller, faster, and more dangerous prey as we drove megafauna to extinction is difficult -- and so is hunting new prey in new environments.  Warthogs are perfectly capable of digging up roots and tubers.

JS

Our adaptability has allowed us to maintain our dominance as a species post-agriculture though.  The origin is irrelevant.  Similarly, that Warthogs do something isn't sufficient to prove that it's bad.  There are plenty of apex predators on the verge of extinction today, and plenty of herbivores and omnivores that are thriving.  So there's a genetic fallacy here, that adaptability is only good in reference to traditional apex predator behavior because that was its origin, and there's an association fallacy here, that warthogs are bad and we don't want to be like warthogs.  Maybe this was just poor word choice.

Brace: I hear you, pal. I can ride my bike with no handlebars.

I laughed.

Brace:

The problem with most evolutionary psych is that it's totally speculative.  We really know squat about how Paleolithic humans behaved day to day.

That being said, we have reasonably solid evidence that the majority of their calories came from hunted meat.  The reason we needed to be adaptive is because hunting smaller, faster, and more dangerous prey as we drove megafauna to extinction is difficult -- and so is hunting new prey in new environments.  Warthogs are perfectly capable of digging up roots and tubers.

JS

I think there is a serious risk in turning evolutionary psych into its own dogmatic form of essentialism and consequently into a sort of secular faith if taken too far.

So true …

Principles are admirable. Dogma is despicable. Living according to your own evolution is … simply … natural.